Authors: Thomas Berger
Reinhart called at the dean’s office posthaste, already having been the target of remarks in bars, inarticulate grumbles by gray-sideburned potguts on the theme of why so much meat was not yet sacked in olive drab. The dean’s secretary, one of those tight-rectumed persons whose every little motion is spite against some subject so long vanished that every other human being has taken on his-her appearance, after consulting the records told him with much satisfaction that the Enlisted Reserve Corps had a certain academic standard to which he failed to measure up. He cut classes and went to town and got stinking, which was not easy to do in an otherwise deserted tavern on Wednesday afternoon with no music. A fortyish waitress named Wanda some time in the next six hours told him
I knock off work at eleven
and at eleven-thirty, in a one-room apartment where a leaky faucet dripped a quick rhythm to which no one could have kept stride, displayed unusually kittenish ways and a pair of thick thighs marbled with blue veins. The First Time he had ever really Got In; as usual the popular consensus, which in his dormitory held that the experience was persistently overrated, was a lie; indeed, it had been in all his years the lone achievement; a pity that our society offered no male career in that direction.
In the late spring, just before the end of the year, another alteration in his university’s theory of the reserves. If they limited membership to the bright students, the campus would soon be depopulated by the draft; so now a simple passing grade became a ticket of entry. Reinhart was permitted to sign up and given a little wallet-card signed by the Secretary of War as an assurance that he would do his service in the classroom. Actually, he was still ahead of time, was still not old enough to register for the draft. He had been a clever fellow in grammar school, doing eight years in seven, before the rot set in, and was yet only seventeen.
Sophomore German was
Wilhelm Tell,
tough to read, maudlin of sentiment. Reinhart now had a lodging in town and in consideration of the low rent went without maid service; a
gemütlich
sty except on those monthly occasions when his nihilism grew strong enough to annihilate itself temporarily and he borrowed the landlady’s carpet sweeper. He read
The Sorrows of Werther
on his own, in English of course, and went so far as to get lent the German text by his professor, who after the fashion of the kind supposed that only good students had such ambitions and was at once wary, impressed, and all the more condescending for the pretense that he was not. But it was far too tedious to go line for line with the original; he pooped out on page two.
As to the other courses, American history was worst, debunking all the colorful legends and filling the vacuum so made with a thick Cream-of-Wheat of—as usual—economics; tariffs and taxes and indentured servants and land grants, and a general agreement that every one of the wars could have been avoided had these items not been mishandled by well-meaning but inept statesmen.
At the end of the fall term Reinhart made
I
-for-incomplete in history, as an alternative to the F he would have received had he not one morning in February absentmindedly cut his toenail too deep, inadvertently generating a wound which kept him from the exam. Presently the
I
stood for infinity: along about the beginning of March his gorge rose for the last time and would not come down; he went to the campus headquarters of the reserve and signed on for active duty.
His parents protested in their pallid way, finding everything a rejection of them and at a loss to see that their weak representations made self-counsel necessary; as if an impalpable father were not enough, he had a mother with whom nothing succeeded like failure. She would have preferred his staying in school, especially now that he was flunking. He tried to convince her that the Army life held promise of far more squalid drudgery than did college, that it was likely a person of his delicate constitution would collapse in training, and she was to a degree mollified.
Of course he didn’t really say this; he seldom talked to his parents at all, simply, on his holiday visits home, communicating silently through the shoulder blades, a language he had learned from his father. When he was a small boy Reinhart had often wished for a temporary catastrophe from which he could rescue his folks—an unarmed burglar or minor fire—not only to show he cared but also to see if they did, if they could honor triumph as well as defeat, but the occasion never came, and just as well, for it might have come during one of his frequent illnesses—at which time, anyway, he
had
their interest.
They were German too, one generation closer than he, and celebrated the fact in their tastes—must have, because they could hardly have invented them on their own: heavy, flavorless food, limited ambitions, disapproval of the maverick, funeral-going, trust in people with broad faces, and belief in the special virtue of a dreary breed known as the German mother. “German” as a lifelong malady that was without hope but never serious; as the thin edge above want and far below plenty; as crepe-hanging; as self-pity—yet from these compounding a strange morality that regarded itself as superior to all variant modes. He had been encouraged since infancy to think of himself as an average man, but in a harshly restricted community where some were less average than others; if wealthy, had immorally taken too much from the world; if very poor, were immorally lazy; if taking pleasure in the material, ostentatious; if ascetic, holier-than-thou. But never “German” as the lofty vision, the old and exquisite manners of prince and peasant, battlements and armor, clear water splashing down from high, blue rocks, wine named for the milk of the Virgin, maleness, the noble marriage of feeling and thought.
But they sent him to college, on an insurance policy which his father, being an agent, had sold to himself, and the premiums for which, lean year in and out, had claimed all their unencumbered money, and Reinhart had first opted for Liberal Arts instead of Business Administration and now left even that. As he departed for camp he carried, along with his toilet articles and change of socks in a miniature suitcase, an acute suspicion that he would come to nothing, and... a marvelous sense of relief.
At the induction center an interviewer saw the
B
in zoology on the record and put him down for a medic, asking him first, though, for as a volunteer you had some faint choice. And he agreed, suddenly finding his bloodthirsty fancy had paled; a superior and sensitive person deplored violence; it didn’t, as every retroactive commentator on past wars insisted, “settle anything.” He personally had made himself so strong with the weights that no one bothered him, and if they did, he generally gave way in the conviction that not only were they probably right but that also anger and hostility were degrading. Under the Geneva Rules medical troops were all but neutral, and in recognition of this were not intentionally shot at and if captured were obliged to go on treating wounded, theirs or the enemy’s, it made no difference; they were above the taking of sides.
The Germans honored this convention—that was admitted by the most rabid. For after he had been in the service a few months, Reinhart began to seek reasons why the Germans, while wrong—they warred against the U.S., for one thing, and it was probably true that Czechoslovakia and Norway and Holland, little harmless Holland!, had inoffensively not deserved invasion; true as well that, even discounting for cheap newsmen and their “copy,” there had been regrettable brutalities by the extremist, Nazi units, although in view of the Belgian babies of World War I you should go cautiously here; they were surely wrong to torture Jews, who he had discovered in college were, at least in their American branch, a pretty good bunch of fellows given certain peculiarities, and who apparently had not during the German inflation of the twenties enriched themselves while gentiles starved, as alleged by Hitler & Co., although one must be careful here, too, in simple justice, for anyone who had ever traded in a Hebrew haberdashery knew the Jew as far from a naïve man—he had come under an obligation to find reasons why the Germans, though mistaken, though bullies, though bad, if you will, were yet not
bad,
were not to be allowed that case which the greatest writers assure us even Satan has.
The Army, oddly enough, was filled with superior people, the universities being then in the process of emptying to that purpose. Every barracks had its circle of cultivation, and while its membership was still outnumbered by the gross herd playing cards, shooting dice, and shouting incessantly fuck this, fuck that, it in the strength of unity read newspaper editorials, went on pass to hear the nearest city’s philharmonic, and discussed international political events. At every post where Reinhart served, this circle in fact had been semi-officialized, meeting at least once a week with the authority and encouragement of an intellectual officer. Since he was channeled in that direction by cultural imperatives and nobody else seemed interested in him, Reinhart willy-nilly frequented this society, attending a few concerts, where he felt unpleasantly conspicuous as the middle-aged civilian audience beamed benevolently on the display of high-minded soldiery, and sitting in on some discussions, quaking with terror that he might be called upon to add his half-cent. If that sum were indeed low enough to symbolize the content of his head as he sat surrounded by his frighteningly articulate comrades.
The prevailing sentiment was, as one intense, red-haired, hollow-cheeked PFC (they were all privates and PFCs) put it, “just left of center, like FDR.” Reinhart literally did not know what this meant, except that while in grammar and high schools, when he took his father’s cue in politics, he had detested Roosevelt, had at campaign times worn little buttons against him, one for Landon pinned to a sunflower head of yellow felt, another reading simply: “We don’t want Eleanor either.” And still, even after he lost all interest in that sort of thing, carried a vague distaste for the man which was renewed at every picture of the teeth, the cape, the cigarette holder, the dog, the wife melting in good will, the sons drooping in false modesty, the desk ornaments, and Sarah Delano R., the grim progenitor of all these. Yet it was not subsequently hard to swallow that he had been an improvement on old Hoover, starched-collar, pickle-faced, the personified
No.
And whatever left-of-center now meant—he had always supposed it a kind of radical creed presided over by kindly-looking cranks like Norman Thomas who were understood to be not serious and a more extreme variety represented by Earl Browder with his mustache and dark shirt and faintly alien air, which might be sinister if it ever got its most improbable chance—what it meant now could only be something respectable, if somewhat strangely motivated, for these young men professed a constant concern for victims of one social outrage or another, in which company they themselves could not be counted, so that it was not a demonstration of self-interest.
Reinhart was impressed, even cowed, by their easy yet earnest assurance and disturbed by the shrinking of his hitherto supposed wide horizon. How he had wasted his faculties to date! Even if his sympathies had been all along on the right side: these people too were opposed—and from a far more intelligent point of vantage—to the double-breasted, cigar-smoking deities of business, the devotional poems in Sunday supplements, Mother’s Day, Congressmen, and the suburban imagination. In college he had been too apathetic to find this out, confined in the circle of self as he was then. Beneath the surface pall there was meat in the political and economic disciplines; as approached by these acute young men, they were adventurous and splendid and, he soon saw, were far fitter areas for the mature moral effort than the gross physical projects he had earlier honored.
For example, one’s build. These men, by his earlier standards, were usually physical wrecks, if small, skinny, if large, flabby, shoulders slumped, belly, if they had one, bulging, the whole man hung with garments as a point of merit shabby as the Army would allow. And no pride of carriage even in the shower, where if he met one of them Reinhart was thrown into confusion: embarrassed by his undulating biceps as he soaped the scalp, yet unwilling to loose the arm’s tension if there was also present one of the common sort of soldier who didn’t applaud intellect.
It was stupid, perhaps mean, to be a good soldier in any manner, although he had been right to get appointed to the medics on motives of nonviolence. All these people had been drafted, so that they had no choice, but they
would
have chosen the medical department. Some even had friends immensely admired who would not serve in anything but conscientious-objector enclosures; some others confessed that while that was going too far for them, it was a thing most noble for a man to hold fast at any sacrifice to what he believed right and true, against
the mob,
by which they certainly did not mean
the people,
who were always r. and t, but rather the crowd who ran things. Reinhart would earlier have supposed the latter meant Roosevelt and his entourage, with everything but Maine and Vermont, four terms without hindrance, no end in sight, but he soon found this a misapprehension, the situation being precisely the reverse, with all such good folk victims. Indeed, the persons to be admired were invariably victims, and the degree of their victimization was the degree of one’s approval. The unfortunates even included some staggeringly rich men, who however were “liberal” and therefore smeared, earning the herohood into which poor men were enlisted at birth.
Reinhart had never used his head for much but dreams, he knew, and this new employment of the brain was exciting as well as good, for neither did it ignore the heart as it surveyed the vast panorama of the evil that men had made in the world and recommended sensible alleviations. The underfed coolies of Asia alongside the oversated warlords; the black and twisted miner deep in the earth’s entrails, considered with the flabby oyster of a mineowner in his house on the hill; the poor little have-not, next to the arrogant, pudgy have. These contrasts were inexcusable in a world where education should be within everyone’s reach, where it was now technically feasible for every man to be served by the machine rather than vice versa; they were wicked and what was worse, silly, most of the wrong people not wishing to be bad so much as not understanding what was good.